Traditionally, two-level inverters with GTOs (gate turn-off thyristors) were the choice for medium- and high-voltage level applications such as motor drives and static VAR (reactive power) compensation. Multi-level inverters using IGBTs (insulated gate bipolar transistors) have been proposed for replacing the GTO-based two-level inverters in medium-voltage applications. Because IGBTs can switch faster and have less demanding gate drive requirements than GTOs, inverters with these devices can significantly reduce the size and weight of passive filter components and offer better voltage waveforms with less harmonic contents and lower dv/dt. Due to the rapid switching capability of IGBTs, it is advantageous to supply them with dc voltages in multiple levels to produce near sinusoidal output voltages. Some of the known types of configurations for these inverters are the cascaded H-bridge, diode-clamped and flying capacitor multi-level inverters. A technical problem is that as the number of dc voltage levels, m, grows, the number of active switches increases according to 2×(m−1) for the cascaded H-bridge, diode-clamped and flying capacitor multi-level inverters.